For many Americans, Opening Day was, and remains, the true marker
of each year's beginning. Here we relive the Opening Days of
baseball's most storied and glamorous team, the New York American
League club that began as the Highlanders and achieved glory as the
Yankees. As we watch the Yankees year by year, we watch them, as
well as baseball and the social fabric of America, change
gradually, and at times radically. We begin early in the century,
when the team played at Hilltop Park and follow them as their
opening day venue shifted to the Polo Grounds, the gigantic new
Yankee Stadium, Shea Stadium, back to the renovated Yankee Stadium,
and finally in the new Yankee Stadium. We also see them open in
historic Fenway Park, fondly remembered Shibe Park and Griffith
Stadium, and all around the expanded leagues after 1961. We see the
first game in which Ted Williams and Joe DiMaggio played against
each other, the only game in which Williams shared the diamond with
Lou Gehrig. We ponder the fact that, with that Opening Day of 1939,
the Yankees entered the era of broadcast baseball with no
expectation that the tail would eventually be wagging the dog. We
see the teams of Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Joe DiMaggio, Mickey
Mantle, and Derek Jeter gradually give way, each to the next. We
watch the annual opening-day celebration modified and affected by
wars, by economic depression and expansion, by the shift of
populations West and to the suburbs, and by political protest. We
see presidents and mayors, actors and singers, and of course,
managers and owners and players. We see protesters at Opening Day,
1945, demanding that black men, so vital to the war effort in
Europe and the Pacific, be allowed to play in the major leagues.
Eleven years later, we see President Eisenhower, eating peanuts and
staying for the whole game as he watched the integrated New York
and Washington teams open the 1956 season.
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